Modes of Distribution

The fundamental internal contradiction of any economy is that between the level of supplies available and the level of consumption demands. The law of human needs developing ahead of production capabilities describes the basic mechanism of economic development, and indicates that there can be no final point in that development. On the other hand, there is a problem of distributing social wealth among the people. This problem was being resolved differently in different epochs.

The simplest mechanism of distribution is direct seizure: as soon as one can get something, one immediately consumes it, with no regard for the needs of the others and the society as a whole. This way of distribution ascends to lower animals, with their primitive metabolism. In humans, this type of behavior can be observed in little children, and usually it is forced out during the process of socialization. However, the traces of such suppressed behavior can be easily found in many acts of the adults, especially in those called asocial, criminal, or mentally insane.

However, already in higher animals, one can observe a different type of behavior, when the available goods get distributed according to the positions of the individuals in a dominance structure. Generally, this mode of distribution is associated with a kind of collective behavior aimed to obtain the goods to be distributed, which assumes a definite level of functional differentiation. Basically, this type of distribution is very like simple seizure, but the individuals that win a higher rank can seize what the others have got. Quite often, such a dominance may be combined with exercising force on the individuals of a lower rank, up to killing them.

On a higher level, various forms of social behavior become built into the organism through instincts or conditioning, which may look like inherent sociality. Thus, a domestic cat may occasionally bring kittens from the street to give them some food, or steal a pack of butter from the neighbors (or just kill a mouse) and bring it to its human mates... No forcing is involve in such social behavior, the interests of the group dominating over organic needs.

In the history of the humanity, one can trace similar stages, though at a qualitatively different basis. Since animals do not actually produce any good, but rather procure them, there can be no permanent roles, related to the individual's place in a common activity. In the human society, there are objectively formed social roles, arising from the objective development of the mode of production, and the corresponding socioeconomic organization. As a result, biological factors are negligible in determining one's place in the society, and hence one's share of the gross public wealth produced. The humanity starts where the animal evolution finds its apex, and the innate sociality of behavior is an ab initio condition for humans. However, there may be different types of social behavior, depending on the way they are induced in an individual by the society.

Every economy develops following the same global stages, socioeconomic formations, and every socioeconomic formation is characterized by the dominant mode of production and the corresponding mode of consumption. The mode of distribution effectuates the link from production to consumption, while the mode of accumulation provides the way of collecting distributed resources for a new production cycle.

So, the mode of distribution is one of the aspects determining a socioeconomic formation, and it must be considered within the general course of economic development. This means that, first, the forms of distribution depend on the current production level, and, second, that these forms cannot be changed at will, without changing the mode of production and the mode of consumption, which requires a definite level of economic efficiency achieved.

The primitive communal system is associated with a rather low efficiency of production, and a most scarce stock of supplies available. In such societies, distribution can be nothing but "pragmatic", that is, the goods available must be distributed in a way so as to allow the whole community to survive, and the supplies need not be spent on those individuals who cannot be or become useful for communal survival. In the XX century, this kind of distribution has been revived in the concept of triage, ascending to the policy adopted by the US army in the conditions of severe shortage of supplies during the Korean war. Since the normal economic mechanisms had been suppressed by the war, the mode of distribution had to degrade down to the primitive forms, though in a somewhat modernized arrangement.

The stage of socioeconomic development following the primitive communal system is called civilization. In the societies of that level, consumption is mediated by property, and the distribution of public wealth takes the form of appropriation. The efficiency of production is high enough in a civilized society, to allow supporting the minimal biological needs of all the people, but it is too low to ensure equally satisfying their social needs as well.

The history of civilization knows three major socioeconomic formations: slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Every one of these formations has its own ways of distribution, all of them being merely specific forms of appropriation. Their major feature is that a part of society is in a preferable position and hence can appropriate more public wealth, as compared to those who have produced this wealth. The three "exploitatory" formations differ in the implementation of this social inequality, including the relation of different social groups to property as the leading determiner. Thus, in the slavery formation, slaves generally could not have any property at all, while all the goods they produced were appropriated by the slave-owners, so that the society was explicitly split into the parts one of which could have property and the other could not, and the latter was the property of the former. Under feudalism, all the members of society could have property, but the productive layers of the society were still explicitly obliged to feed the lords and clerics, though, in general, not being their property. It is under capitalism, that the property relations have acquired true universality, so that everybody could have property without any formal obligation to impart it to anybody.

Of course, the pure abstract forms cannot exist in reality, and history is not an exception. One can observe that certain features of feudalism, slavery, and even the primitive communal system find their place in a capitalist economy as well, constituting one of its lower-lying levels. For instance, many governmental regulations violate the principles of the pure market economy, introducing the non-economic regulations characteristic of feudalism. Similarly, many phenomena of the "shadow economy" (which may overweigh the standard "open" economy in some countries) resemble the norms of slavery. Communal organization too has its own niche in capitalist economy, being represented by numerous self-regulating communities (formal or informal), acting as a collective owner on the market.

The principal feature of the modes of distribution in all the three stages of civilization is that the portion of the common wealth appropriatable by a person or a social group is proportional to the total mass of property accumulated by that person or group. Those who have no property have no civil rights --- it was an explicit rule of slavery, and it functions as a dynamic principle under capitalism.

The post-civilization stage of human development will have its own mechanisms of distribution. This level will overcome the exploitation character of the property-mediated economy, and the mode of distribution will be other than appropriation. As the negation of negation (in Hegel's sense), it will reproduce some traits of the primitive communal system, though in a transformed way. Theoretically, one could expect that the mode of distribution will be somewhat like direct supply on demand, with strong self-restriction by the socially determined limits of reasonable consumption, which assumes a highly developed culture of consumption. To achieve this, the humanity must reach a very high level of production efficiency, so that the discrepancy between the people's needs and the goods available would become ever transitory, and all the needs (including those beyond the average living standards) could be satisfied with time. The only problem for the distribution system to solve would be that of essentially unique or immensely large resources required for some activities. The social system will have to regulate the access to such resources according to some new principles yet to be developed.

However, we can try to get insights into this unusual world of the future, considering the system of triage, first being a medical discipline, and later extended to the totality of social life. In its present form, triage is nothing but the revival of the primitive communal system in the extreme conditions of consumption only possible far below the limit of social sufficiency. The idea of the traditional theory of triage is to concentrate the resources available on what seems more promising than the rest for efficient operation, or achieving some social goals. It is considered quite useless to spend precious supplies on those who are not going to "make it". There may be cases, when the expenses cannot be formally explained --- but such cases are treated as exceptions, never undermining the general rule. This principle is often associated with the bell shaped Gauss curve, with the central maximum placed in the point of optimal expense, and the dispersion (width) of the distribution related to the amount of supplies available.

Such a scheme cannot be directly applied to the post-civilization society, since one of its determining features is the efficiency of production high enough to satisfy all the reasonable demands, and it is the distribution of the excess (that is, satisfying demands beyond the average level) that is concerned. Since proceeding with the mainstream activities has been already ensured, it would be much more valuable for the society to concentrate on the problematic areas, where one might find unexpected solution that could revolutionize all the economy. It is well known that the most promising discoveries come from the domains, where research seemed utterly impractical and meaningless, and the people that could significantly contribute to the development of the society are most likely to fail to survive in a critical situation, which requires a more primitive behavior. That is, the strategy of the post-civilization mode of distribution would rather be "inverted triage", with concentration of unique resources on the most problematic areas, with the average consumption level kept.